B spent all day today dealing with the cars. She took the old one in to have its brakes done ($330 - this is the sort of reason why we bought a new car), and talked to the body shop about the new one. Apparently it functioned as designed and the damage was limited to the bumper-grill and front-end area. Even the right front side panel was not damaged. Amazing.

She also got a rental car for at least this week. Until we get the old car back we're carless, and I'm going to see another Lesh & Friends benefit on Thursday and we're both going to Zero on Friday night, and we need a car we can rely on.

B came by my office near the end of the day. I was still struggling with screen shots for chapter 7. It was too late to put me on the rental car, but we drove over to a nearby Vietnamese restaurant that it turned out was hosting a private party and instead had an excellent dinner at the relatively new Thai place next door. B's old friend David had come over to ferry her around and help her deal with all the errands today, and they'd talked about what's been going on in our relationship, as well as in his (a long time ago, in another lifetime, they had had a volatile love affair, one they're both still living down in some ways).

One interesting thing is that twenty years or so ago David had made by hand a book of poetry by himself and B, to commemorate their bitter parting of the ways. The book was lost in the Oakland hills fire of '91 (after which, David and Laurie boarded with us for a few weeks, one big happy family) along with a lot of other talisman's from David's (and Briggs' past), but it turns out that long ago another friend of David's had xeroxed the poems in the book and she recently gave him the copies. Briggs has been wandering through her extensive journals and archives of personal artifacts lately, stirring up old feelings and trying to figure out how to make writing out of it all, and the reappearance of this book seemed to fit in perfectly with what's been going on.